Libby Hemphill

Design decisions in the RideNow project

The RideNow Project is designed to help individuals within a group or organization coordinate ad hoc shared rides. This paper describes three design decisions the RideNow team made in order to allow incremental adoption and evolution and to capitalize on local conditions. (1) The system allows users to interact with the system through email or Web, because we anticipate that email will be most convenient when there are few users but the Web interface will be more useful as the number of users increase. (2) The system does not force structure on user-entered data such as dates, times, and locations, instead allowing conventions to emerge. (3) We use the groups shared physical spaces to provide additional information about ride sharing activity.

Tweet acts: how constituents lobby congress via Twitter

Twitter is increasingly becoming a medium through which constituents can lobby their elected representatives in Congress about issues that matter to them. Past research has focused on how citizens communicate with each other or how members of Congress (MOCs) use social media in general; our research examines how citizens communicate with MOCs. We contribute to existing literature through the careful examination of hundreds of citizen-authored tweets and the development of a categorization scheme to describe common strategies of lobbying on Twitter. Our findings show that contrary to past research that assumed citizens used Twitter to merely shout out their opinions on issues, citizens utilize a variety of sophisticated techniques to impact political outcomes.

Feminism and social media research

CSCW has begun to publish feminist studies and to host panels that specifically address feminist issues such as gender in peer production. Building on these renewed interests on gender and social computing, we present a workshop on feminist approaches to social media research. The goals of our workshop are to identify ways to improve social media research by leveraging feminist approaches and to provide an opportunity for researchers to reflect on their practices in order to learn from one another.

Exploring the Role of Interactive Computer Simulations in Public Administration Education

Preparing public administration students for complex challenges that involve high uncertainty, stakeholder interdependencies, policy resistance, and slow feedback cycles presents unique challenges for educators. Those in the field of public administration and public policy can broaden their educational toolbox by embracing new technologies for educating future public administration practitioners. This research demonstrates that interactive computer simulations provide dynamic contexts and creative learning environments for students to individually and collectively apply systems thinking in information-rich environments with instant feedback channels. Across a series of exploratory studies using an interactive simulation focused on water uncertainty and policy options, this research has consistently found strong learning outcomes. The findings showed that students were able to quickly grasp the complexity associated with interdependent stakeholders with divergent interests, uncertain future conditions, and policy options that reflect competing values. However, this research also discovered some unintended consequences. Using interaction simulations may limit the scope of deliberation topics to only those that were highlighted by the simulation. Thus the research concludes with a discussion of some ethical concerns related to the use of computer simulations as part of an educational exercise.1

Quantifying Toxicity and Verbal Violence on Twitter

Online harassment is a continuing problem, endemic to many social media platforms and other means of web-based communications, and few means exist to analyze web content for instances of verbal violence and aggression. We are developing a scale of online aggression that can be applied to Twitter posts (tweets) and that is based on existing measures of trait aggression and cyberbullying. For the purpose of testing and validating our scale, we are relying on Mechanical Turk, an Amazon Web Service, through which we can enlist and pay workers to code our dataset of tweets. Preliminary results suggest that aggression in tweets is difficult for human coders to identify and that we have not reached consensus about what constitutes harassment online. We discuss our preliminary results and propose next steps such as scale modification and automated classifier development.

Challenges in Modifying Existing Scales for Detecting Harassment in Individual Tweets

In an effort to create new sociotechnical tools to combat online harassment, we developed a scale to detect and measure verbal violence within individual tweets. Unfortunately, we found that the scale, based on scales effective at detecting harassment offline, was unreliable for tweets. Here, we begin with information about the development and validation of our scale, then discuss the scale’s shortcomings for detecting harassment in tweets, and explore what we can learn from this scale’s failures. We explore how rarity, context, and individual coder’s differences create challenges for detecting verbal violence in individual tweets. We also examine differences in onand offline harassment that limit the utility of existing harassment measures for online contexts. We close with a discussion of potential avenues for future work in automated harassment detection.

The uncertainty challenge of contingent collaboration

Contingent knowledge workers will play an increasingly important role in organisational success as workers transition in and out of project-based innovation teams with more frequency. Our research finds that collaborators in the contingent, high-skill workforce face uncertainty challenges to their work that are unique from the independent, contingent professionals more often studied. The article proposes a theoretical framework of uncertainty to guide us in understanding collaborative contingent knowledge workers’ work experience. Interviews with postdoctoral researchers reveal four findings about the influence of these highly uncertain work environments on collaborative contingent knowledge workers – collaboration isolation, frustrated independence, performance anxiety and internalised blame. Perhaps most concerning is that the workers internalise the negative impacts as personal failings instead of recognising them as consequences of a poorly designed work environment. This study argues for the need to manage and mitigate different sources of uncertainty to avoid creating an unnecessary burden on contingent knowledge workers, and to enable a sustainable, contingent knowledge workforce.

On the production of the spirit of feminism

3 6 I N T E R A C T I O N S S E P T E M B E R – O C T O B E R 2 016 This piece is no exception. Yet the tale we tell here is not another report of inequalities uncovered. Instead, it is a story of an awakening, a story that takes place within an already feministidentified group about how we came to a different way of thinking. This transformation took place in a series of workshops on feminism and social media at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) conferences in 2014 and 2015. In putting ideals into practice in these events, we as organizers gained insight into what the word feminist means to us and what we think it can mean more globally within the tech communities of which we are a part. References to feminism in our community are usually triggered by the appearance of something controversial or seemingly atypical, like sexism in the comments section of a site. Feminism also gets invoked when recognizing the inequities between male and “Other-ed” developers, or when acknowledging the asymmetries intrinsic in modern realities such as algorithmic culture. Here, the moniker feminist is pointedly used to distinguish something from the mainstream, from the “normal” way of doing things. It also immediately charges what is to come with an alternative set of logics and values. On the Production of the Spirit of Feminism Ingrid Erickson, Rutgers University Libby Hemphill, Illinois Institute of Technology Amanda Menking, University of Washington Stephanie Steinhardt, Cornell University

Twiki and wetpaint: two wikis in academic environments

This paper describes a community-based effort to preserve organizational knowledge and to orientate newcomers to a graduate school. It presents a very brief review of recent research on wiki use in corporate and organizational environments and initial data from two wiki implementation iterations within our academic community. We contrast use of a TWiki with that of a WetPaint wiki. Our data suggest that with low barriers to participation and a great deal of patience, wikis can be useful stores for community information and knowledge sharing.

The ethos and pragmatics of data sharing

The focus of this panel is the pragmatics of data sharing as framed by the needs and pressures of scholarly work. Panelists represent a lively blend of quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods researchers with recent experiences in developing and sharing data. Panelists will present research and address questions related to data collection and management, human subjects protocols, data archival and data repositories and other emergent issues.